During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic in Canada I wanted to get better understanding of the geographical distribution of COVID-19 related activity changes across Canada.

Google has helpfully provided freely available global “Community Mobility Reporting” which shows Google location history change compared to baseline by country, and country sub-regions. These provide changes in activity by location categories: Workplace, Retail & Recreation, Transit Stations, Grocery & Pharmacy and Parks locations, and Residential locations. For Canada it is available by province. As of April 19, data contained daily values from Feb 15 to Apr 11.

The Community Mobility Reporting data is available as a single csv file for all countries at Google Community Mobility Report site. In addition, Google provides feature to filter for specific country or country sub regions eg state or provinces, etc and download resulting PDF format.

As the COVID-19 lockdowns occurred across Canada you would expect that people were less likely to be in public spaces and more likely to be at home. The Community Mobility Reporting location history allows us to get some insight into whether or not this happened, and if it did, to what degree and how this changed over time.

I also created an Excel version of this heat map visualization using Pivot Table & Chart plus conditional formatting. This Excel file, described in more detail below, is available in the Github repository.

More detail and screenshots of visualizations is provided below:

Heatmaps
Heatmaps are grids where columns represent date and rows province/territory. Each heatmap is a grid representing a single mobility report category. The grid cell colors represent value of percent change which could be positive or negative. Changes can be observed as lockdowns occurred where locations in public areas decreased relative to baseline. Inversely, residential location increased relative to baseline as people sheltered in place at their homes.

1) Heatmap created using Excel / Power Query: For this heatmap visualization the global csv data was transformed using Excel Power Query. The Excel file has two Pivot Table and Chart combos. The Excel files and Power Query M Code are in the repository. Excel files are available in Github repository.

2) Heatmap created using D3.js: For this heatmap visualization the global csv data was transformed using Excel Power Query. The heatmap visualization was created using slightly modified code from ONSvisual.

Bar charts
These were created using Excel to visualize percent change by Province/Territory and location category using Excel / Power Query. These allow comparison between provinces by date and category. This Excel / Power Query file can be used for analytical purposes to slice and dice global data by date, country, sub region 1 & 2 and category. Excel files are available in Github repository.

During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic in Canada I wanted to get better understanding of the geographical distribution of COVID-19 cases across Canada. So I set about to make a choropleth map visualization of confirmed COVID-19 case counts in Canada. I also created a separate choropleth map for Montreal which is Canada’s COVID-19 “hotspot” with about 25-30% of Canada’s total confirmed COVID-19 cases.

The only similar geographical boundaries that have confirmed case counts for all of Canada that I could find for was by: 1) province/territory and 2) health region.

I choose to use health regions in these choropleth maps because there are lots of maps by province / territory. The health regions are geographical boundaries described by provincial health authorities. They likely roughly correspond to population size.

I used Leaflet.js open-source JavaScript library to create the interactive choropleth maps, using D3.js to retrieve and transform csv format data, and Javascript to retrieve JSON geographic boundary files.

The confirmed COVID-19 case counts are available in csv file format from the COVID-19 Canada Open Data Working Group. The csv files are maintained on Github which is updated daily collating data from provinces and territories.

The health region geographical boundary descriptions were obtained primarily from Statscan ArcGIS Health region boundary Canada dataset. However, I needed to make some modifications to update boundaries used by health regions which is described in more detail in Github repository README.

The biggest challenge to create these choropleth maps were data issues were relating geographical boundary names to the confirmed case health region name. Basically needed to create a lookup table to match different names in boundary data file and confirmed counts data file. See Github repository for more details on boundary modifications and relationship between boundary names and health region names.

This Sankey chart represents human arterial blood flow from the heart down into the smallest named arteries. I couldn’t find anything else like this online so spent a few hours cleaning up data and creating this visualization.

A Sankey chart visualizes directional connections between “nodes”. In this case the nodes are the artery names and the connections are flow of blood through the arteries.

Two snippets from the visualization’s top level branches from heart to body and lungs are shown below. The grey connections represent blood flow. The colored ‘blocks’ represent the arteries.

You are able to click on the nodes which will highlight the connections and blood flow. This is a great way to see how blood flows from artery to artery.

The complete Sankey chart is very big. A zoomed out screenshot of it is shown below. The data used to create the visualization is also provided here.